Oy Story: 'Cars 2' Is a Dollar-Driven Edsel

What's in a 'Names of Love'? Satiric, surreal fun; 'Bad Teacher' and star Diaz make no grade

Watch a clip from the film "Cars 2," courtesy Walt Disney Pictures.

By

Joe Morgenstern

June 24, 2011

Five years ago, when "Cars" proved to be Pixar's first less-than-stellar animated feature, an animator friend offered his theory about why. Cars, he said, can have faces, but they don't have hands; there's only so much you can have them do. To make up for their lack of hands, the cars in "Cars 2" do all sorts of cool things with their front tires, and the 3-D animation as a whole is spectacular. But the movie has its own deficits—a lack of variety, originality, subtlety, clarity and plain old charm. The law of averages has finally caught up with the most remarkable studio in modern movie history, the dream factory that lived up to Buzz Lightyear's joyous cry of "To infinity and beyond." This frenzied sequel seldom gets beyond mediocrity.

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Lightning McQueen and Tow Mater in 'Cars 2.'
Disney/Pixar

There's certainly no lack of clarity in the calculations behind Pixar's swerve. In the five years since "Cars" was released, the movie has sold something in the neighborhood of $10 billion in merchandise—cute little cars, trucks and other vehicles that keep rolling off the toymakers' assembly lines in epic numbers. To sustain such financial numbers—and to pave the way for next summer's opening of a 12-acre Cars Land at Disney's California Adventure Park—Pixar and Disney, the animation studio's relatively new owner, needed a hard-sell crowd-pleaser with exactly the sort of high-octane action and high-decibel soundtrack that energizes—or blights, depending on your point of view—"Cars 2." This is something new for Pixar, a movie in which characterization and deep feelings take a back seat to breakneck pace, and something new for Pixar lovers, including me, who may find themselves wondering if Disney's master merchandisers are starting to call the tune for Pixar's master storytellers.

The story here concerns a pair of American innocents abroad—Lightning McQueen, the bright-red race car brightly voiced by Owen Wilson, and Tow Mater, the buck-toothed, good-hearted tow truck who speaks in the cornpone tones of Larry the Cable Guy. Taking their leave of Radiator Springs, the time-warpy desert town that served as the setting for "Cars," the two buddies head for Europe, where Lightning enters the first of several competitions in the World Grand Prix, and Mater is mistaken for a spy. The repetitive race sequences—vroom vroom vrooming at warp speed—are intercut with a James Bond spoof that centers on Finn McMissile, a supercar with superweapons voiced by Michael Caine, and that starts the action in a preface set on a giant oil platform at sea. (The preface to "Toy Story 3," which was absurdly and delightfully over the top, turned out to be Andy's fantasy. This one, elaborate but clumsy, is part of the narrative.)

From one moment to the next, "Cars 2" comes up with plenty of visual zingers: a Parisian marché aux pieces (as in spare parts); a plunge into the giant clockworks of London's Big Bentley; a Japanese toilet designed to pamper any chassis; exotic cars galore, including such exotic lemons as the Pacer, the Gremlin and what the movie calls the Hugo. And as cool as the story tends to be on a scale of emotional temperature, it does evoke an affecting friendship between Lightning and Mater, one that's tested by driving ambition and a deadly bomb.

Still, this is a Pixar animated feature we're talking about, a film from the people who brought genuine enchantment into our lives with tales of toys come alive, of beguiling bugs, fantastical fishies, impassioned robots and self-reflective superheroes. What's more, it's a film co-directed (with Brad Lewis) by John Lasseter, the man who, more than anyone else, has embodied the studio's spirit from the days when he used a computer to create a pioneering Pixar short about a couple of desk lamps.

By now it's a commonplace that Mr. Lasseter, whose father was a parts-department manager in a Chevy dealership in Southern California, was prompted to make the first "Cars" by profound car love. That film, for all its odd mixture of tedium and frenzy, operated within recognizable Pixar parameters. But in this one, cars seem unconstrained by the laws of physics and writers seemed unconcerned with developing character, as opposed to belaboring it. (Mater gets to be as maddening as that old Hollywood yodeler Andy Devine.) For Pixar's sake, and for ours, let's hope that the fast track of "Cars 2" is a temporary detour.

Watch a clip from the film "The Names of Love," courtesy Music Box Films.

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Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin in 'The Names of Love.'
Music Box Films

'The Names of Love'

"Our two families embody France," says Baya Benmahmoud, the delightful heroine of Michel Leclerc's sharp-witted, sometimes surreal and largely autobiographical French-language comedy, which he directed from a script he wrote with Baya Kasmi. So they do in many ways, though not necessarily in the amorous way one might infer from the misleading English title.

Baya, who is played by Sara Forestier, has an earnest Algerian father and a screwy French mother. The filmmaker's surrogate, Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin), has a Jewish mother of immigrant parents and a father who served in the Algerian war. The political intricacies on both sides are too complex to detail here, while the comedy flows, with daunting fluency, from the ostensibly mismatched lovers. Baya, a sentimental left-winger who is as volatile as she is alluring, sleeps with conservatives in order to convert them; she considers her body a weapon with which to destroy the right wing. Arthur, a middle-age middle-of-the-roader, studies bird flu as a scientist; at one point he can't sleep with Baya because he must perform a necropsy on suspect geese.

"The Names of Love" isn't a completely misleading title, since love, along with lovemaking, does prevail. Still, the original title, "Le Nom des Gens"—literally "People's Names"—comes much closer to conveying the story's essence. Mr. Leclerc's movie, in French with good English subtitles, often plays like romantic comedy, but it's really a sophisticated burlesque about the significance of surnames (his is comically common, hers misleads people into thinking she's Brazilian,) plus some quintessentially French obsessions: the trap of racial identity; the politics of ethnicity and the fateful power of the past, populated as it is for Baya and Arthur by ancestors who suffered for them, dreamed for them and loved them.

'Bad Teacher'

From the evidence on screen, no one who made this alleged comedy ever noticed that no one in it was remotely likable.

The heroine, Elizabeth Halsey (Cameron Diaz), has been teaching at a middle school to kill time until her impending marriage to a rich guy. Her academic qualifications are never in evidence, but she is, manifestly, a lazy, cynical, oversexed, unprincipled, foul-mouthed, pot-puffing, booze-slugging, gold-digging slut who is not only dislikable but unfunny. Then her marriage plans go awry and her flaws multiply.

Have talented actors ever struggled so much to so little avail? Ms. Diaz sells her lines like a street vendor peddling fake Timexes. Lucy Punch mugs and pouts as Elizabeth's rival, Amy Squirrel. Justin Timberlake plays the creepily fey Scott Delacorte, a rich substitute teacher who sings a ghastly song called "Simpatico." ("Ask me how much I love you. A lottico.") Only Jason Segel finds a few fugitive flashes of likability—yes, I'm backtracking a bit here—as a gym teacher named Russell Gettis. (Lots more gravitas in that name than in Squirrel.)

How did "Bad Teacher," which was directed by Jake Kasdan, come into being? Maybe someone, having seen Jack Black in "The School of Rock," decided to do something even raunchier with a female teacher (and failed to notice that both the star and his material were terrifically funny.) Or maybe the production began—as it should have ended—with the clever, risqué poster that shows, among other things, Ms. Diaz with her booted feet on a teacher's desk. How much do I loathe this film? A lottico is putting it mildico.

DVD FOCUS

'A Bug's Life' (1998)

The second Pixar feature, this animated fable teems with vivid creatures standing on their own countless feet. The ant hero, Flik (Dave Foley), wants to throw off the tyranny of the grasshoppers, who, led by the malevolent Hopper (Kevin Spacey), demand a huge cut of every harvest. Journeying forth to the big city in search of help, Flik mistakes the members of a broken-down flea circus for puissant warriors, brings them back home and presents them as the colony's saviors. The clowns redeem themselves, but only by helping fearful antdom find the courage to get real and hang tough.

'Amélie' (2001)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's French-language fable isn't about racial identity, or any of the other preoccupations of "The Names of Love." As a stylistic tour de force, though, it has been hugely influential on many filmmakers of varied ethnicities. First the film conjures up a telepathic but touchingly fragile heroine, played by Audrey Tautou, who rearranges other people's lives, even though she's terrified to live her own. Then the movie puts this elfin do-gooder/do-badder at the center of a fanciful world that looks like everyone's idealized notion of Paris: no crowds, no dirt, no traffic, no permanent grief.

'Any Given Sunday' (1999)

Thinking about Cameron Diaz may not put you in mind of Oliver Stone's movie about human worth vs. net worth, but it's entertaining all the same. Al Pacino is an aging coach who still thinks the game should be fun. Ms. Diaz is Christina Pagniacci, a steely young franchise owner, and Jamie Foxx is Willie Beamen, a headstrong quarterback who brings Christina's team a star quality that she covets. If the field is tilted toward traditional values, that's the fun of this fantasy version of the NFL, in which morality finally proves a smoother lubricant than corporate moolah.

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